“I am glad you didn’t,” said Maria, entering and removing her hat.  She smiled at her aunt, who continued to gaze at her with the sharpest curiosity.

“Where have you been to walk this time of night?” she demanded.

Maria looked at her aunt, and said, quite gravely, “Aunt Maria, you trust me, don’t you?”

“Of course I do; but I want to know.  I have a right to know.”

“Yes, you have,” said Maria, “but I shall never tell you as long as I live where I have been to-night.”

“What?”

“I shall never tell you were I have been, only you can rest assured that there is no harm—­that there has been no harm.”

“You don’t mean to ever tell?”

“No.”  Maria took a lamp from the sitting-room table, lighted it, and went up-stairs.

“You are just like your mother—­just as set,” Aunt Maria called after her, in subdued tones.  “Here I’ve been watchin’ till I was ’most crazy.”

“I am real sorry,” Maria called back.  “Good-night, Aunt Maria.  Such a thing will never happen again.”

Directly Maria was in her own room she pulled down her window-shades.  She did not see a man, who had followed at a long distance all the way from the station, moving rapidly up the street.  It was Wollaston Lee.  He had seen, from the window of the smoker, that there was no carriage waiting, had jumped off the train, entered the station, then stolen out and followed Maria until he saw her safely in her home.  Then the last trolley had gone, and he walked the rest of the way to Westbridge.

Chapter XXX

The next morning, which was Sunday, Maria could not go to church.  An utter weariness and lassitude, to which she was a stranger, was over her.  Evelyn remained at home with her.  Evelyn still had the idea firmly fixed in her mind that Maria was grieving over Professor Lane.  It was also firmly fixed in Aunt Maria’s mind.  Aunt Maria, who had both suspicion and imagination, had conceived a reason for Maria’s mysterious absence the night before.  She knew that Professor Lane was to take a night train from Westbridge.  She jumped at the conclusion that Maria had gone to Westbridge to see him off, and had missed the trolley connection.  There were two trolley-lines between Amity and Westbridge, and that accounted for her walking to the house.  Aunt Maria was mortified and angry.  She would have been mortified to have her niece so disturbed over any man who had not proposed marriage to her, but when she reflected upon Professor Lane, his sunken chest, his skinny throat, and his sparse gray hair, although he was yet a handsome man for his years, she experienced a positive nausea.  She was glad when Evelyn came down in the morning and said that Maria had called to her, and said she did not want any breakfast and did not feel able to go to church.

“Do you think sister is going to be sick, Aunt Maria?” Evelyn said, anxiously.  Then her sweet eyes met her aunt’s, and both the young and the old maid blushed at the thought which they simultaneously had.